Fundación Barça’s UNHCR Sports Partnership
One of the Top 20 Most Influential Projects of 2024
For promoting migrant and refugee rights through sport
Region: Europe Sector: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Entertainment UN SDG: 17, Partnerships for the Goals
Say “Barça” and even people who aren’t interested in soccer will probably understand that you’re referencing one of the world’s most beloved futból teams. Each home game, the Barcelona-based team plays for a crowd of more than 83,000 fans, and that’s only a fraction of Barça’s overall global reach. The Instagram account of the football club, which celebrates its 125th anniversary in 2024, has more than 129 million followers.
These numbers are important because FC Barça’s charitable arm, Fundación Barça, has joined the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a campaign to raise awareness about the lives and needs of migrating people around the world, especially refugees. The UNHCR defines refugees as “people who have fled their countries to escape conflict, violence, or persecution and have sought safety in another country.” There are more than 100 million refugees worldwide; 40 percent of them are children. The UN agency works directly with refugees, especially those who are still on the journey after fleeing their country of origin, to provide both immediate crisis relief and longer-term solutions by engaging partners in the international community to assist with resettlement and acculturation in transit and host countries.
Often, those partnerships involve providing tangible goods, such as food or clothing, or services, such as support to help refugees find stable long-term housing or enroll their children in school. But increasingly, the UNHCR has realized that educating people about refugees and the challenges they face is a vital part of their work. Partners like Barça are essential to these efforts.
Fundación Barça’s partnership with the UNHCR, signed in 2022, is a four-season agreement that consists of two primary components. The first is Barça’s commitment to fund sports activities in UNHCR’s refugee camps in Colombia, Turkey, Malaysia and Uganda, providing $400,000 euros per season as well as 100,000 euros’ worth of gear per season to the camps. The second component involves the placement of UNHCR’s logo on FC Barça’s players’ jerseys for a period of four years; the logo appears on the back of the jerseys, directly below each player’s number.
Corporate sponsors know how coveted — and how costly — a spot on a jersey can be, especially on jerseys of such a globally popular team. Historically, landing Barça jersey real estate has been even more difficult because the soccer club’s leadership has avoided commercialization, driving up demand. In 2023, Spotify paid Barça $70 million euros for a logo position on players’ jerseys. UNHCR hopes that the prominent positioning of its logo on the jerseys will encourage fans, whether in the stadium or on social media, to question what UNHCR is, learn more about its work, and get involved in refugee-related causes. Overall, the goal is to “raise awareness about the difficult situations of refugees and people who have experienced forced displacement around the world,” reads a UNHCR press release about the partnership.
Paco Sanz León, Fundación Barça’s corporate manager, says that the partnership also involves players off the field. “We involve soccer players in actions like our video for World Refugee Day. The goal is that these actions have greater resonance. Collaboration among different sectors is key when it comes to solutions for addressing the refugee crisis,” Sanz says. “At FC Barcelóna and our foundation, we accept our responsibility with respect to inclusion and support of refugees through these initiatives.”
With so many heart-rending problems suffered by people around the world, raising awareness and getting people to care about humanitarian crises is challenging work. For its part, Fundación Barça views sports as a powerful vehicle for achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). “For UNHCR to count on us to add our little grain of sand to the cause of refugees is a point of pride for us and honors our motto: More than a team,” says Sanz.